Boards of Canada are back. The Scottish duo's fifth studio album, Inferno, arrived overnight on Warp Records — an 18-track, 70-minute double LP that ends the 13-year wait that began when Tomorrow's Harvest dropped in 2013. It is, by some distance, the longest gap between proper BoC albums since brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin first surfaced on Warp in the late '90s, and the rollout that delivered it has been just as patient.
Speculation about a return started building in earnest last spring, when mysterious VHS tapes began circulating among fans and the duo's Hexagon Sun symbol started showing up on posters in cities around the world. Sandison and Eoin formally broke their silence on April 16 with "Tape 05," their first new piece of music in over a decade, although the track itself does not appear on Inferno. Lead singles "Introit" and "Prophecy At 1420 MHz" arrived on May 7 as a single double-A-side video directed by Robert Beatty, and the album's tracklist and formats were revealed alongside Warp's pre-order rollout.
To mark the release, Warp staged a series of worldwide "Inferno Sessions" listening events on May 22 across seven cities — Tokyo, Berlin, Barcelona, London, Glasgow, New York, and Los Angeles — and local record stores hosted their own listening parties on May 28. Inferno is out now digitally, on CD, and on standard black double vinyl, with a deluxe edition pressed on transparent red 2LP in a triple-gatefold sleeve with a 16-page booklet.
On a first pass, Inferno trades the cold, end-of-the-world dread of Tomorrow's Harvest for something thornier and more sample-heavy. Billboard, in its release-day write-up, flagged "You Retreat In Time And Space," the inquisitive "Arena Americanada," and the chant-laced "Age Of Capricorn" as standouts, and singled out "Father And Son" as perhaps the duo's most dialogue-driven piece to date — a back-and-forth of cult samples sewn into a quilt of decayed electronics. Beatportal called it "18 new tracks of bleak, dark, post-apocalyptic atmosphere, warped nostalgia and eerie melodic pull from one of electronic music's most mythologized acts."
Inferno Tracklist
1. Introit
2. Prophecy At 1420 MHz
3. Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan
4. Age Of Capricorn
5. Father And Son
6. Somewhere Right Now In The Future
7. Naraka
8. Acts Of Magic
9. Memory Death
10. The Word Becomes Flesh
11. Into The Magic Land
12. Blood In The Labyrinth
13. Deep Time
14. All Reason Departs
15. Arena Americanada
16. The Process
17. You Retreat In Time And Space
18. I Saw Through Platonia
Boards of Canada have always been a band that rewards patience: their catalog of slow-decay melodies and half-remembered television hauntings has aged into something like the unofficial soundtrack of internet nostalgia itself. Inferno arrives in a very different world from the one that received Tomorrow's Harvest — louder, hotter, and noisier in every direction. The fact that the duo sound, on first listen, completely undisturbed by any of it is the most Boards of Canada thing about it.